Something's gotten into Microsoft lately. Its developers are singing like canaries about their plans for Internet Explorer 8. Earlier this month, Microsoft released IE8 Beta 1, which is intended mainly as an early look for Web developers. It's quite a change for a product that seemed to have gone dark in the days after Vista's release.

All during 2007, Microsoft said basically nothing about what it was doing for the next version of its flagship browser. The paucity of substantial blog entries on the IE Blog left some doubt whether Microsoft was doing anything at all, besides IE7 security patches. The blog hit bottom in early December 2007, with a content-free post that announced the successor to IE7 would be called IE8. That same day, Molly Holschlag got a chance to interview Bill Gates about the lack of IE8 information coming out of Microsoft. Gates' response: "I'll have to ask Dean [Hachamovitch, general manager of the IE8 project] what the hell is going on."

Gates seems to have followed through on his promise. The posts on the IE Blog have become more substantive and more frequent. March isn't even half over and the blog is on a record pace with 17 posts that are mostly related to IE8. The JScript Blog isn't quite as active, but it has also picked up the pace of IE8-related information. Now that IE8 Beta 1 has shipped, both blogs are putting out useful information.

Best of all, IE8 seems like it is finally going to address shortcomings that have been ignored by Microsoft for almost a decade. IE7 was mostly small patches to functionality and a new user interface, but didn't improve standards support in any major way. IE8 makes a major jump in support for CSS and HTML standards, plus it lends developers a hand with a real debugger. Any Web designer who's ever tried to figure out a "works on Firefox, breaks on IE" problem will love that.